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Mostrando postagens com marcador Robin Wright. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Robin Wright. Mostrar todas as postagens

sexta-feira, 1 de julho de 2022

Ukraine: The West Débuts a New Strategy to Confront a Historic “Inflection Point” - Robin Wright (The New Yorker)

The New Yorker

The West Débuts a New Strategy to Confront a Historic “Inflection Point”

In Madrid this week, NATO laid out a bold plan for military expansion in response to Putin’s war. But can its member states overcome political divisions at home?
Joe Biden walks offstage after addressing media representatives during a press conference at the NATO summit.
“Putin thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” Joe Biden said. “He wanted the Finlandization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland.”Photograph by Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

The last time NATO leaders hashed out a new global strategy, in 2010, the alliance officially embraced Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev, the puppet stand-in for Vladimir Putin, attended the summit, in Lisbon. “The period of distance in our relations and claims against each other is over,” Medvedev declared. The Western powers, in turn, announced “a true strategic partnership” with Russia to create “a common space of peace, stability, and security.” They promised political dialogue as well as practical coöperation on issues ranging from missile defense and counterterrorism to counter-narcotics.

Well, that’s over. At a summit this week in Madrid, the world’s mightiest military alliance grew both mightier and bolder in confronting Russia. NATO vowed to ramp up troop presence and war matériel to secure Europe against future Russian aggression and to aid Ukraine’s campaign, for “as long as it takes,” to win back the territory seized by Putin. The NATOSecretary-General Jens Stoltenberg described the new strategy as the “biggest overhaul of our collective defense deterrence since the end of the Cold War.” It includes a greater U.S. presence in Eastern nations close to Russia, such as Estonia and Romania, and a permanent U.S. deployment in Poland, on NATO’s eastern flank. The U.S. now has more than a hundred thousand military personnel across Europe. “We’re stepping up,” President Joe Biden said.

The new strategy reflects a dramatic shift in the West—from talk of Europe’s economic and security interdependence with Russia, in the post-Cold War era, to open confrontation with Moscow, Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATOwho now heads the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told me. Stoltenberg called the summit “transformational.”

The NATO summit also marks a departure from the policies of Donald Trump, who said he “trusted” Putin, threatened to withdraw from NATO, and left his fellow-leaders shaken at every encounter. NATO’s reach is instead expanding. It had just twelve founding members in 1949. With the invitations extended this week to Sweden and Finland, it will soon include thirty-two countries, and its frontline with Russia will double. “Putin thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” Biden said at a press conference on Thursday. “He wanted the Finlandization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland.” The new strategic concept for the first time cites the challenges posed by China and the need to build “resilience” against political meddling, disinformation, energy shortages, and food insecurity. In another first, it pledged to deepen ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific. The leaders of Japan and South Korea met with NATO members, including Biden, on the sidelines in Madrid.

The new strategy is muscular and sweeping in ways that could play out for years, even decades, Doug Lute, a former Ambassador to NATO and retired three-star general, told me. Putin’s war, and NATO’s response, represents a historic “inflection point,” like the fall of the Soviet Union or the 9/11 attacks, he said. The summit, however, did not address how NATO envisions ending the war or what it will do about membership for Ukraine. On Wednesday, the director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, predicted that the war could grind on for an “extended” time. Putin intends to seize most of Ukraine, not just the eastern and southern regions he now controls, she said. In a speech to NATO leaders, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, asked whether his nation had “not paid enough” to join NATO. More than ten thousand Ukrainians—up to two hundred a day—have been killed since Russia launched its invasion, in February. More than five million have fled the country; another seven million have been displaced inside it. More than a hundred billion dollars in civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, with the World Bank projecting that the Ukrainian economy will contract by up to forty-five per cent this year.

“Russia’s tactics are very simple. It destroys everything—houses, shopping malls, schools, hospitals,” Zelensky said. “Next year, the situation may be worse not only for Ukraine but also for several other countries, possibly NATO members, that may be under fire from Russia. Then it will be our common failure.” Under Article 10, NATO membership is open to any “European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” The military alliance, Zelensky pleaded, should “find a place for Ukraine in the common security space.”

For all their collective might, key NATO governments are individually weak, and facing electoral challenges. Biden’s political support has sunk in the run-up to midterm elections. “The domestic foundations of U.S. foreign policy are much more fragile than they once were,” Charles Kupchan noted in Foreign Affairs this week. A survey conducted by IPSOSand NPR near the first anniversary of the January 6th Capitol riot found that seven out of ten Americans—and a majority irrespective of party affiliation, age, gender, or region—believe the United States is at risk of failing altogether. In another poll this week, eighty-five per cent of American adults said the country was headed in the “wrong direction.”

In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson’s numbers are tanking. Last month, he barely survived a mutinous no-confidence vote in which forty per cent of his own party voted against him. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, just announced plans for a referendum on its independence. The week before the NATO summit, France faced political paralysis after the centrist Ensemble coalition of President Emmanuel Macron lost majority control in legislative elections. Support for the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen, who likes Putin and wants to withdraw from NATO’s military command, surged more than tenfold—from eight to a record eight-nine seats. The upset, which created the first minority government in more than three decades, puts the nation at greater risk “in view of the challenges we have to face,” the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, said.

Meanwhile, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has only held power since December, faces an unprecedented energy crisis, as Russia cuts off the country’s supply of natural gas. (Russia has “weaponized energy” by cinching gas flows to twelve European nations, Frans Timmermans, the European Union climate chief, said last month.) Germany is divided politically, too, over how much weaponry to provide Ukraine.

In Italy, the Five Star Movement—the largest party in the national unity government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi—has split in two over Ukraine. Italy had a long history of warm relations with Russia, but Putin’s war triggered a political crisis in Rome. Draghi supports aid to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, and increasing Italy’s defense budget, while the former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a populist who leads the Five Star Movement and has previously befriended Putin, has opposed all three. Last month, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, a co-founder of Five Star, walked away from it. He led more than sixty lawmakers to form a breakaway party to support Draghi’s policies, despite the escalating hits on Italy’s economy. And most NATO members face spiralling inflation, higher gas prices, and crises over food security and troubled supply lines.

One of the common challenges across NATO is the political drift from its core values, Lute said. NATO stipulates that its purpose is to “guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means.” It’s a commitment to democracy. Seven decades later, member states such as Turkey and Hungary are under the thumb of increasingly autocratic leaders. The internal political divisions there and elsewhere open the way for Russian interference, Lute noted. “Russia doesn’t have to create the fissure. Russia only has to sort of try to enlarge and deepen the fissure.”

Any prospect of NATO fulfilling its new strategy has to begin with political unity at home. “It’s going to be an exceedingly tough challenge to actually do what NATO says it’s going to do, unless we can get past some of these divisions,” Lute said. Daalder countered that NATO’s widening agenda is sustainable because the alliance itself is not a political football in any member state. Even during the Trump years, the House and Senate passed bipartisan legislation to prevent a withdrawal from NATO. But it will take the better part of this decade, he acknowledged, to fulfill all the tangible pledges on defense budgets and troop commitments.

Away from the accelerating political drama back in Washington, the President had a good week overseas. But then he had to come home. ♦

segunda-feira, 16 de agosto de 2021

Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era? - Robin Wright (New Yorker)

Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era?

It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.

By Robin Wright

The New Yorker, August 15, 2021


 

History will surely note this absurdly ill-timed tweet. On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy. With the Taliban sweeping across the country, storming one provincial capital after another, the prospect that diplomacy would work a year after U.S.-backed talks in Qatar began—and quickly stalled—was illusory. By Thursday, the Afghan government controlled only three major cities. President Joe Biden, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, announced that he was dispatching three thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan to pull hundreds of its diplomats and staff out of that Embassy. And, by Sunday, it was all over—before dusk. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, his government collapsed, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces simply melted away as the Taliban moved into the capital. American diplomats—having evacuated the fortress-like U.S. Embassy—were forced to shelter in place at the airport as they waited to be evacuated. America’s two-decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan has ended. For Americans, Afghanistan looks a little, maybe a lot, like a trillion-dollar throwaway. Meanwhile, Afghans are left in free fall.

It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

It’s now part of an unnerving American pattern, dating back to the nineteen-seventies. On Sunday, social-media posts of side-by-side photos evoked painful memories. One captured a desperate crowd climbing up a ladder to the rooftop of a building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to get on one of the last helicopters out in 1975, during the Ford Administration. The other showed a Chinook helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, tried to argue on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” It didn’t wash. And there are other episodes. In 1984, the Reagan Administration withdrew the U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Beirut after a suicide bomber from a nascent cell of what became Hezbollah killed more than two hundred and forty military personnel—the largest loss for the Marines in a single incident since the Second World War. In 2011, the United States pulled out of Iraq, opening the way for the emergence of ISIS. The repeated miscalculations challenge basic Washington policy-making as well as U.S. military strategy and intelligence capabilities. Why wasn’t this looming calamity—or any of the earlier ones—anticipated? Or the exits better planned? Or the country not left in the hands of a former enemy? It is a dishonorable end.

Whatever the historic truth decades from now, the U.S. will be widely perceived by the world today as having lost what George W. Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—despite having mobilized NATO for its first deployment outside Europe or North America, a hundred and thirty-six countries to provide various types of military assistance, and twenty-three countries to host U.S. forces deployed in offensive operations. America’s vast tools and tactics proved ill-equipped to counter the will and endurance of the Taliban and their Pakistani backers. In the long term, its missiles and warplanes were unable to vanquish a movement of sixty thousand core fighters in a country about as big as Texas.

There are many repercussions that will endure long after the U.S. withdrawal. First, jihadism has won a key battle against democracy. The West believed that its armor and steel, backed by a generous infusion of aid, could defeat a hard-line ideology with a strong local following. The Taliban are likely, once again, to install Sharia as law of the land. Afghanistan will again, almost certainly, become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of Al Qaeda or others in search of a haven or a sponsor. It’s a gloomy prospect as Americans prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month. Since 2001, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadi extremists have seeded franchises on all six inhabited continents. Last month, the United States sanctioned an ISIS branch as far afield as Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southern Africa where almost sixty per cent of the population is Christian.

Second, both Afghanistan and Iraq have proved that the United States can neither build nations nor create armies out of scratch, especially in countries that have a limited middle class and low education rates, over a decade or two. It takes generations. Not enough people have the knowledge or experience to navigate whole new ways of life, whatever they want in principle. Ethnic and sectarian divisions thwart attempts to overhaul political, social, and economic life all at the same time. The United States spent eighty-three billion dollars training and arming an Afghan force of some three hundred thousand—more than four times the size of the Taliban’s militia. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Mark Milley told reporters back in 2013. He is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, by March, when I was last in Kabul, the Taliban controlled half of the country. Between May and mid-August, it took the other half—most just during the past week. Last month, Biden said that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war.” In the end, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul—and the Presidential palace—on Sunday.

Third, America’s standing abroad is profoundly weakened, symbolized by the U.S. Embassy’s lowering the Stars and Stripes for the final time on Sunday. Smoke was seen rising from the grounds of the Embassy—which cost almost eight hundred million dollars to expand just five years ago—as matériel was burned in the rush to exit. Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives. It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.

America’s Great Retreat is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. The United States was in Afghanistan twice as long and spent far more. The Soviet Union is estimated to have spent about fifty billion dollars during the first seven of its ten years occupying the mountainous country. Yes, the United States fostered the birth of a rich civil society, the education of girls, and an independent media. It facilitated democratic elections more than once and witnessed the transfer of power. Thirty-seven per cent of Afghan girls are now able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. The TOLO channel hosted eighteen seasons of “Afghan Star,” a singing competition much like “American Idol.” Zahra Elham, a twentysomething member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, became the first woman to win, in 2019. But untold numbers of the Afghans encouraged by the United States are desperately searching for ways out of the country as the Taliban move in. Women have pulled out their blue burqas again. And the enduring imagery of the Americans flying out on their helicopters will be no different than Soviet troops marching across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to the then Soviet Union on February 15, 1989. Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.

For the United States, the costs do not end with its withdrawal from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It could cost another two trillion dollars just to pay for the health care and disability of veterans from those wars. And those costs may not peak until 2048. America’s longest war will be a lot longer than anyone anticipated two decades ago—or even as it ends. In all, forty-seven thousand civilians have died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. More than twenty-four hundred were U.S. military personnel, and almost four thousand were U.S. contractors.

I first went to Afghanistan in 1999, during the original Taliban rule. I drove through the breathtaking Khyber Pass from Pakistan, past the fortified estates of the drug lords along the border, on the rutted, axle-destroying roads to Kabul. The images of the Taliban’s repressive rule—little kids working on the streets of Afghan towns to support widowed mothers not allowed in public, checkpoints festooned with confiscated audio and video tapes—are indelible. I went back with Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first trip after the fall of the Taliban. There was hope then of something different, even as the prospect of it often seemed elusive, and the idea sullied by the country’s corrupt new rulers. I’ve been back several times since, including in March with General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, who is now overseeing the final U.S. military operations. On Sunday, as America erased its presence in Afghanistan in a race to get out, I wondered: Was it all for naught? What other consequences will America face from its failed campaign in Afghanistan decades from now? We barely know the answers.


 

Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

 

 

 

segunda-feira, 30 de setembro de 2013

Redesenhando o mapa (de 100 anos atras) do Oriente Medio - Robin Wright

Robin Wright
International Herald Tribune, September 29, 2013
(Excerpts in Foreign Policy)

"The map of the modern Middle East, a political and economic pivot in the international order, is in tatters. Syria's ruinous war is the turning point. But the centrifugal forces of rival beliefs, tribes and ethnicities -- empowered by unintended consequences of the Arab Spring -- are also pulling apart a region defined by European colonial powers a century ago and defended by Arab autocrats ever since.

A different map would be a strategic game changer for just about everybody, potentially reconfiguring alliances, security challenges, trade and energy flows for much of the world, too.

Syria's prime location and muscle make it the strategic center of the Middle East. But it is a complex country, rich in religious and ethnic variety, and therefore fragile. After independence, Syria reeled from more than a half-dozen coups between 1949 and 1970, when the Assad dynasty seized full control. Now, after 30 months of bloodletting, diversity has turned deadly, killing both people and country. Syria has crumbled into three identifiable regions, each with its own flag and security forces. A different future is taking shape: a narrow statelet along a corridor from the south through Damascus, Homs and Hama to the northern Mediterranean coast controlled by the Assads' minority Alawite sect. In the north, a small Kurdistan, largely autonomous since mid-2012. The biggest chunk is the Sunni-dominated heartland.

Syria's unraveling would set precedents for the region, beginning next door. Until now, Iraq resisted falling apart because of foreign pressure, regional fear of going it alone and oil wealth that bought loyalty, at least on paper. But Syria is now sucking Iraq into its maelstrom."